How we tested
NEWSREADERS
We’ve been RSS addicts for a long time, and we’ve used a variety of desktop, web and iOS apps to manage our feeds. Our current online aggregator is Feedly, which we use to organise our feeds in folders and to sync across multiple platforms – so if we use the ReadKit app to read via Feedly on our Mac, Feedly then updates its own app on iOS. That’s handy if your desktop app lacks an iOS companion.
We subscribed our apps to Feedly where possible and we added subscriptions manually via search or URL where appropriate. If a newsreader supported OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), we imported subscriptions that way.
We focussed on four key areas: how easy it was to add RSS feeds, how quickly and easily we could find our way around the app, what sharing and synchronisation options were available and, most importantly of all, how much personalisation each app offered. We use RSS to tame information overload, and having a consistent, customisable interface makes a huge difference to how much information you can process and how quickly you can process it.